Founder Scott Smith reflects on changing brewing/restaurant culture as he prepares to turn over popular eatery after 25 years.

Feb. 12, 2014

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Scott Smith, center, founder of CooperSmith's Pub and Brewing in Old Town, poses Monday with Sandy Longton, general manager, left, and Chris O'Mara, operations manager. Smith announced he would be stepping down as majority owner of the restaurant and brewery and handing it to Longton, O'Mara and Dwight Hall, head brewer. Hall was on vacation. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

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Before Charmaine Stavedahl and Bruce Jancin moved their young family from Northern California to Northern Colorado, they came scouting.

It was almost winter, 1994, and Stavedahl had been out to visit a few months earlier, reporting back to Jancin with two cities for his follow-up trip. She knew she had a clear favorite and had noticed two “very different vibes,” but she wanted her husband’s unbiased opinion of their future hometown.

That cold November, Stavedahl sent Jancin first to Boulder, where he remembers a real estate agent driving him from house to house in a sports car. The kind with heated leather seats. It was, he said, the first time he had ever sat in them. Then she sent him to Fort Collins, with specific instructions to stop at CooperSmith’s Pub & Brewing.

They moved with two kids to the Choice City not long after.

“You wouldn’t believe how many stories I get like that,” said Scott Smith.

Smith, 54, is the founder and president of CooperSmith’s, which will turn 25 in November. Since its modest beginning in 1989 as Fort Collins’ first brewpub, Smith has grown his company to employ 120 workers. He’s stretched it across Old Town Square, over two outdoor patios and two separate buildings, and with the help of original brewer Brad Page and current brewer (soon to be President) Dwight Hall, he’s gone from four house beers on tap to about 20. Selling upward of 2,000 barrels of beer each year, CooperSmith’s is consistently placed among the U.S.’s top 20 beer-producing pubs, according to Smith. And throughout the years, a handful of successful spinoffs have sprung up across the country, using CooperSmith’s as their model.

Sitting in the restaurant during a steady Monday lunch hour, Smith now exudes a certain preretirement energy. This week, he is waiting on the paperwork that will effectively pass ownership of his brewpub to the three current managing partners, Dwight Hall, Sandy Longton and Chris O’Mara.

The father of Fort Collins brewing, Smith feels that in handing over his business, he is keeping CooperSmith’s in the family. His three replacements have been with him practically since the beginning, when they started as a dishwasher and line cooks. Just as important to Smith, they are actively involved in their community.

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“You can’t be a local restaurant when your owner is fishing in Wisconsin during six of the busiest months of the year. ... You’ve got to wake up and think, ‘How do I make this better?’ Now it takes me until noon to think that.”

At this point, Smith said, he doesn’t wake up “hungry” anymore in the morning. Instead, he said, “I’m fat and happy.”

Smith is stepping out of a business in its seasoned prime, in a town that he said is once again “on the cusp of greatness.” When he and his wife Jane Liska decided to get out of CooperSmith’s this year, by selling most of their shares back to the brewpub, which will in turn sell those shares to Hall, Longton and O’Mara, the couple also sent out a notice to other stockholders.

“And nobody wanted out,” Smith said. “If I had done that 10 years ago, there might have been this panic, but the confidence is already there in these three people. Everybody wants to see them succeed.”

Smith said he then approached First National Bank to finance the turnover, and the response was, “Absolutely.”

Twenty-five years earlier, the young entrepreneur faced a much rougher landscape when he entered into Fort Collins.

“Banks wouldn’t even talk to us,” he said. “First of all, it was the restaurant business, and nobody in their right mind puts money into a restaurant. Also, nobody knew what a brewpub was.”

When CooperSmith’s opened in November 1989, it was only the third brewpub in the state. Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing Company, famously started by Gov. John Hickenlooper, had opened in October a year earlier, while Durango’s Carver Brewing came quickly behind it. At that time, Smith was managing Old Chicago in Fort Collins, and he had just introduced the World Beer Tour at the restaurant. His customers seemed very thirsty for just that sort of thing.

“When we put a beer list of 110 beers into Old Chicago, and the place was packed every night with people tasting and making notes, I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re onto something here.’ ”

Before 1988, Colorado law prohibited the on-premise production and retail sale of beer in the same establishment. That year, just off his Beer Tour success and attending a restaurant auction, Smith met a chef who introduced his Denver business as a new brewpub. To a very baffled Smith, the chef explained, “Well, now the law is changing.”

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After that initial meeting, Wynkoop’s founders were crucial to the start of CooperSmith’s.

“I knew the restaurant business probably better than they did. But I had no brewing experience, no experience owning a business and no access to capital, and they helped me with that. They took a small piece of the pie up here, and I took a piece of the pie and then we sold to about 30 separate individual investors who all bought one percent.”

As soon as CooperSmith’s opened, the response from the public was “huge.”

“We were just instantly popular,” Smith said.

Just like a proud father (CooperSmith’s was named after Smith and Liska’s only son), when he talks about Fort Collins, and specifically Old Town, Smith can’t help but divide time into two categories — before and after his brewpub.

A man who is “big on symbolism,” he received in addition to guidance and financial support a very good deal on that 5 Old Town Square location.

“It was about all we could afford,” Smith laughed. With Old Town Square at the time in foreclosure, Smith rented the pub’s first building from a Chicago-based insurance company, who had hired a California-based marketing company to assess the Square’s business problem. That marketing firm practically wrote Smith into its report.

“ ‘You don’t have a big anchor that draws people day and night. You need a big restaurant or possibly even a brewpub.’ ”

But Smith said there were other problems plaguing downtown in the late 1980s.

“We still have our very first menu; the whole back page was teaching people how to use the parking garage and where to park ... . The image was that you couldn’t park downtown. That was one of the problems. But there really wasn’t any synergy going on down here either.”

As Smith tells it, the synergy started immediately after CooperSmith’s opened, “like two days after,” when a second brewery came to Fort Collins.

“I’d wander downstairs, and there would be Doug Odell in the brewer’s office, rummaging through our tools, looking for something. ... We both really helped each other, I think, initially.”

Since their rummaging start, Smith has seen the town of Fort Collins build around him, from micro and nano-breweries to, most recently, downtown housing and “really sophisticated restaurants.”

He admitted that when he and Liska moved to Fort Collins, to help his parents run a baked potato restaurant, they thought they might stay for a couple of months, then move on to Boulder. They never ended up making that move, instead bringing up a family and a brewpub in Fort Collins while spending summers and now retirement at their lake house in Wisconsin.

Fort Collins, though, may be moving closer and closer.

“Yes, we are going to get a little more gentrified, whether we like it or not,” Smith said. “But I see great things for the future of Fort Collins. I’ll just sit back and watch it happen.”